Cuts don't always pulsate with pain. They can be dead easy, going on wholly advantageous. Just turn on your TV and look at the weather.

How many specialist national broadcasters does the BBC need to tell you if you need an umbrella? Some 21. And around the regions? Another 15, with numerous back-ups on radio, TV and the net.

What do they all do, then? Mostly repeat the forecast you heard five minutes earlier, as national and then regional presenters compete to say exactly the same thing. The difference is not in their prediction (how could they be?) but where they go to deliver them. Chelsea flower show? Off we jolly well go. Loch Lomond? A bonny wee bank to chat on. Ash cloud doom returns? Crew and presenter head for East Midlands airport, and fail to find any ash (in a bizarre parody of Nick-Robinson-reporting-from-a-deserted-Downing-Street syndrome). Earnest toilers for BBC World bring sunshine and showers to East Timor, with thunderstorms over southern Tanzania later in the day.

The effort involved is prodigious, labour intensive and intensely time-consuming. Your newspaper can give you all you need to know in four or five sentences. But, in some cost-conscious areas, this circus may be leaving town. Sky News is saying goodbye to the cool Francis Wilson, and cutting its staffing from six to four. News frontmen, henceforth, may be left to mention daily depressions for themselves. And the web can be time- and date-specific beyond TV's wildest aspirations – or could be, if the BBC's prime weather site's latest posted top-level blog wasn't dated 15 December, 2009. "Jumpers at the Ready", warned the chief weather manager then. Alas ... and high jumpers, too?